‘Nobody likes putting rocks on the beach’

Each year, the shorelines of the Great Lakes slip away, taking beaches, stairways and other infrastructure with them. Faced with difficult decisions about how to respond, local officials aren’t sure what to do, in part because the erosion has multiple causes. 

Extreme changes in water levels, fierce storms, decreasing ice coverage and infrastructure that interferes with the natural coastal cycles are all playing their parts in sculpting drastic and unwelcome changes to the shoreline — and making those responsible for preserving it increasingly anxious.

“When we get 15 foot waves on Lake Michigan, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. How much damage are they doing?’” says David Bunte, the supervisor for Chikaming Township, near the southern tip of Lake Michigan. 

Water levels fluctuate naturally in the Great Lakes but intensifying climate change accelerates those changes. What used to be normal on a 20 year cycle is now happening in five or 10 years, says Mike Shriberg, an environmental policy researcher at the University of Michigan.

“We’re seeing record highs and then record lows much closer together,” says Shriberg, whose work focuses on Great Lakes water policy. “The Great Lakes has already experienced more water level change in the last decade than the saltwater coasts are expected to experience in the next 100 years.”

Ice normally acts as a buffer for the shoreline, absorbing the blows of powerful waves in winter storms, but as temperatures warm, diminished ice coverage in the Great Lakes is speeding up coastal erosion.

“I lose sleep over it,” Bunte says. “The ice shelf is extremely important.”

In 2024, the Great Lakes saw historic low ice coverage. In February, when the lakes are typically about half covered, only 2.7% were covered. This year, coverage peaked at about 52% covered.

It’s too early to know the long term effects of less lake ice, but the immediate effects on erosion are already clear, says Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome, a University of Michigan researcher who studies ice on the Great Lakes.

To avoid their houses falling into the lake, some people are taking early interventions. In Shelby, Michigan, some homeowners are separating their homes from their foundations and dragging them farther back from the shoreline. 

These difficult decisions homeowners are facing around the lakes aren’t only caused by changing weather patterns. The proliferation of hardened lakeshore structures, especially in urbanized stretches of the coast, is also contributing.

If they’re not interfered with, lake waves move sand along the coast in a process called littoral drift. At the southern tip of Lake Michigan, for example, this shift goes from east to west and helps protect the coast from erosion. 

Adding physical structures to the lake shore, however, interrupts this cycle. For many towns to the west of the Port of Indiana, for example, the port’s industrial infrastructure interrupts the sand drift and prevents the natural replenishment of their beaches. 

“That dynamic is basically starving the beach from the natural flow of sand,” says Scott Kingan, the town council president of nearby Ogden Dunes, Indiana. “It is a very simple problem, but it is a very complicated answer,” Kingan says, explaining that it’s hard to know how to respond because conditions along the coast change so frequently. 

There are two main strategies for restoring and protecting eroding shoreline: sand renourishment and coastal hardening or armoring. Both, however, are problematic. 

Sand renourishment is a less invasive way to counteract erosion on sand beaches and dunes. It involves bringing in sand to replenish the sand being washed away. But it can be expensive and is only a temporary solution. It has to be done over and over to make a difference the long term. 

The other main option, coastal hardening or armoring, is much more environmentally disruptive. It involves constructing structures to stop the waves from hitting the coast. In some situations, this means adding a concrete retaining wall or building what’s known as a “revetment,” a sloping rock wall along the coast. But this can have negative impacts on the lake as a whole, and can push erosion issues to neighboring communities. 

Chikaming Township is one of the relatively few communities to fully commit to no coastal armoring. In 2021, the township passed an ordinance banning it. The ban had wide community support, Bunte says, because the township had just spent $4.1 million, including $1.6 million in private donations, to expand a shoreline park at a time when erosion was worsening.

“Because so many people put so much money into the purchase of this property, they wanted to protect that, and they wanted as much information as they could to protect not only their investment, but it for future generations,” Bunte says. 

He acknowledges, however, that not every town is in a position to ban coastal hardening entirely. In Ogden Dunes, for example, that’s not a realistic option. 

The community of roughly 1,200 is resorting to armoring because it can’t afford options that are more environmentally benign, and because doing nothing would court disaster, according to Kingan.

“Nobody likes putting rocks on the beach. I don’t like it myself,” Kingan says. But, he adds, “the kind of environmental disaster that would happen if we didn’t do anything, quite honestly, is very terrifying to me. … My role as the town council president is, first and foremost, we have to protect homes and critical town infrastructure.”

Part of the struggle of shoreline protection is that the shorelines of the Great Lakes cross many different local and state jurisdictions. Every town, city, state and even the federal government has a different approach, but because they are all on the same lakes, ripple effects hit everyone.  

“A lot of our shoreline has already, sadly, been hardened, which just exacerbates erosion issues downstream,” says Betsy Maher, the executive director of Save the Dunes, based in northwest Indiana. “You see this death by a thousand cuts where we’re losing our shoreline, our natural shoreline, literally property by property.”

Not only does one community’s decision affect others, but it can be hard to get consensus within a community — because erosion rates follow the cyclical processes of the lake, it’s easy to lose the feeling of urgency, Ogden Dunes’ Kingan says. 

“Unfortunately, the human component of this is tough,” Kingan says. “It’s human nature. People tend to respond more when there’s a crisis, rather than trying to preemptively take measures to protect” the shore. 

When water levels are high, erosion can feel like an emergency. But that’s the “absolute wrong time” to make policy decisions, says the University of Michigan’s Shriberg. When water levels on the lakes hover near historic averages, it is a good time to do long-term planning, he says. 

Ideally, Shriberg says, coastline management would be a cohesive effort that crosses both county and state lines, but there is no single policy that will work for every community, making large-scale planning difficult. 

Even as different coastal communities enact different erosion-centered policies, they are ultimately all working toward the same goal: preserving a viable shoreline. It’s central to their identities as lakefront communities. 

“It’s not that it’s just an ecological resource or economic resource, it is core to the community,” Shriberg says. “A threat to the lakes is something that cuts across everybody.”